Conference Presentation, Keynote
Building the Next Generation of Software | Des Traynor, Fin | RAISE Summit 2026
- Most products face existential irrelevance with an immediate timeline for adaptation, as AI enables competitors to eliminate existing businesses and forces entire categories to converge or disappear.
- Traditional interfaces and point solutions will vanish, replaced by agentic systems that execute outcomes via a single text box, dynamically generating UIs and connecting all data sources.
- Competitive survival will depend entirely on execution speed and reliability, as UI features and code become easily scraped and cloned within minutes, making the ability to pivot the primary differentiator.
- Engineering velocity is projected to increase by an order of magnitude, potentially trebling productivity, halving defect backlogs, and doubling release frequency while lowering the cost per feature.
- Development methodologies must shift to prioritize reliability over design, requiring teams to validate what AI can reliably execute before productizing, alongside adopting scientific rigor and causal analysis.
- Source code generation is expected to become highly automated, with forecasts indicating that roughly 94% of code will be written by AI and a significant portion of pull requests approved algorithmically.
- New roles for designers are anticipated, requiring the ability to code and visualize roadmaps instantly to test multiple directions before traditional building begins.
- Companies must avoid crossing into distinct buyer or system access boundaries to prevent direct competition with established platforms, ensuring they do not replicate existing successful products.
- A critical risk involves the cumulative unreliability of probabilistic AI components, where chaining 90-99% reliable elements can reduce overall system reliability to approximately 85%, potentially causing delays similar to those experienced with major enterprise launches.
- An acquisition agreement is identified as an expectation, with the potential outcome of being acquired by Salesforce.